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Using Cool English Magazine

Cool English is a monthly magazine for teachers and learners of English. The magazine focuses on modern, spoken English in a fun and easy-to-learn format. Each magazine is accompanied by an audio CD so that readers can also listen to the articles, read by English native speakers, in different accents. Each edition of the magazine also comes with a free downloadable Exercise Pack, which allows readers and teachers to practice what they have been learning.

Cool English provides:

• Fascinating reading every month.
• Interesting articles from around the world.
• Real English as spoken by native speakers.
• A fun and truly different way of learning.
• Listening activities with lots of different accents.
• Exercise packs for even more value.

Guiding Principles

The principal objective of Cool English magazine is to offer something unique, different and fresh to the English-language market. Cool English aims to present language in a uniquely friendly and easy-to absorb manner, ensuring that language is taken in both naturally and without effort. Our aim is to make the magazine funny, light, entertaining, attractive and easy-to-read. The easy-to-read text ensures that it can appeal to a wide range of readers, and the topics covered attract readers of all ages, ranging from 16-year-olds to pensioners.

Design

The main aim with regard to the design of Cool English is to make the magazine as attractive and accessible as possible. The design is also used as a tool for making language more understandable. We select illustrations and photos so that they correspond directly to the linguistic item or expression, and therefore reinforce understanding. This is especially notable in the idioms and phrasal verb pages, which are designed to present language in a visually-stimulating manner.

The Magazine: Modern, Spoken English

Language

Cool English deals primarily with modern, spoken language. This ensures that only the most useful language is included that students of all levels will need for everyday communication: we make sure that people learn relevant English. The focus on slang and more informal language also makes the product unique in that no other language-learning magazine or course book deals with this aspect of language.

Difficulty Levels

The magazine has three different levels, and each article is rated according to it’s level of difficulty: 1 (pre-intermediate); 3 (intermediate); and 5 (advanced). This enables teachers to use one magazine for a variety of classes. It also enables readers to register their progress, as they move from reading and understanding predominantly level 1 articles, onto level 3, etc.

Up-to-date

One of the principal advantages of a regularly-produced magazine is that it can provide up-to-date material. Cool English includes many articles of current interest, which will appeal directly to students.

Glossaries

Students have aspects of language explained to them principally through the glossary boxes. These contain easy-to-understand definitions in the target language. The definitions in turn correspond directly to the expression or phrase in context.

The Student's Pack is designed to give students an opportunity to practise the language. The Teacher's Pack gives teachers easy-to-use ready-made lessons.

Grammar

With regard to grammar, Cool English aims to provide students with easy-to-understand explanations of key grammatical points. Our guiding principle with regard to grammar is based on the notion that all grammar is fundamentally about choice. In effect, grammar is selected by the speaker based on the speaker's perception of a situation, or the speaker's decision as to how he/she wishes to communicate the intended message.

Learn New Words!

Each edition of the magazine will help readers to develop their vocabulary, way beyond what they are normally taught at school. This gives readers confidence that they can find the right word and sentence structure when they need it, ensuring that they start speaking with more confidence. A typical magazine will contain around 300 new words, or new usages of already-known words.

THE CD: Listening & Speaking

Real, Spoken Language

With all of the articles, the recordings contain features of spoken English (contractions, pauses, intonation, etc). However, the Conversations and Bar Chats offer students examples of real-time spoken conversations between native speakers, complete with all the usual discourse features such as interruptions, over-lapping, contractions, intonation, informal language, conversational markers and grammatical and lexical errors. The overall intention of this section is to raise students' awareness of some of these features. This in turn will help them when dealing with their own errors, or attempts by some language trainers to focus overly on grammatical and linguistic accuracy at all times.

Accents

Cool English is open to English from all over the English-speaking world. The voices on the CD include accents from Britain, America, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and many other countries.

Linguistic Fluency

Speaking is enhanced within the magazine in the Speaking Section. This contains useful language drills with opportunities for students to practise question formation, pronunciation, rapid response and to revise aspects of basic grammar in fast oral activities that require immediate responses.

The Exercise Pack: Practicing

We also produce a 12 page Ex Pack, to accompany each magazine. It can be downloaded for free from www.cooleglish.co.uk. The Ex Pack is not only free to download, but also photocopiable, so teachers can make as many copies as they like!

Teaching With The Ex Pack

The Ex Pack is great for teachers, as it provides them with a number of teaching opportunities. The easy-to-use exercises come with instructions for teachers, which means minimum class preparation time required!

The exercises have a variety of different tasks, so some can also be set as homework. Others can even be used as a class test, to see if the students have read and understood the original article in the magazine. Answers to the exercises are also provided, so it’s quick to mark, too!

The Ex Pack is also great because, unlike many free materials available on the internet, it is professionally made, by teachers of English, for teachers of English. Quality guaranteed!

Learning With The Ex Pack

Students who use the Ex Pack in class will find an interesting and stimulating selection of tasks to do, based on the same fun materials which they have already encountered in reading Cool English. This therefore allows them to practice what they have already learned, and most probably understand things from the article which they may not have understood the first time round.

And while the Ex Pack is aimed at use by teachers, it can also be used by the motivated home-study student. The exercises are clear and self-explanatory, and most of them can be done by a single learner.

Enjoy Cool English!

William and the Cool English team.

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